the constant searching through menus for information, and the notes he had to physically write for each call he handled.

Thanks to artificial intelligence, the 29-year-old from Athens, Greece is no longer writing notes or clicking on countless menus. He often has full customer profiles in front of him when a person calls in, and may already know what problem the customer has before even saying “hello”. He can spend more time actually serving the customer. “AI has taken (the) robot out of us,” Kirakosian said. Roughly three million Americans work in call centre jobs, and millions more work in call centres around the world, answering billions of inquiries a year about everything from broken iPhones to orders for shoes. Kirakosian works for TTEC, a company that provides third party customer service lines in 22 countries to companies in industries such as autos and banking that need extra capacity or have outsourced their call centre operations.

Answering these calls can be thankless work. Roughly half of all customer service agents leave the job after a year, according to McKinsey, with stress and monotonous work being among the reasons employees quit. Much of what these agents deal with is referred to in the industry as “break/fix”, which means something is broken – or wrong or confusing – and the customer expects the person on the phone to fix the problem. Now, it’s a question of who will be tasked with the fix: a human, a computer, or a human augmented by a computer. (Jamaica Gleaner)